HPC on OpenStack the good, the bad and the ugly

Ümit Seren Github: @timeuHPC Engineer at the Vienna BioCenter Twitter: @timeu_s

5th EasyBuild User Meeting - Jan 30th, 2020 - Barcelona

The “Cloudster” and How we’re Building it!

Shamelessly stolen from Damien François Talk -- “The convergence of HPC and BigDataWhat does it mean for HPC sysadmins?” - FOSDEM 2019

Who Are We ?● Part of Cloud Platform Engineering Team at molecular biology research

institutes (IMP, IMBA,GMI) located in Vienna, Austria at the Vienna Bio Center.

● Tasked with delivery and operations of IT infrastructure for ~ 40 research groups (~ 500 scientists).

● IT department delivers full stack of services from workstations, networking, application hosting and development (among many others).

● Part of IT infrastructure is delivery of HPC services for our campus

● 14 People in total for everything.

Vienna BioCenter Computing Profile● Computing infrastructure almost exclusively dedicated to bioinformatics

(genomics, image processing, cryo electron microscopy, etc.)

● Almost all applications are data exploration, analysis and data processing, no simulation workloads

● Have all machinery for data acquisition on site (sequencers, microscopes, etc.)

● Operating and running several compute clusters for batch computing and several compute clusters for stateful applications (web apps, databases, etc.)

What We Had Before● Siloed islands of infrastructure

● Cant talk to other islands, can’t access data from other island (or difficult logistics for users)

● Nightmare to manage

● No central automation across all resources easily possible

Meet the CLIP Project● OpenStack was chosen to be evaluated further as platform for this

● Setup a project “CLIP” (Cloud Infrastructure Project) and formed project team (4.0 FTE) with a multi phase approach to delivery of the project.

● Goal is to implement not only a new HPC platform but a software defined datacenter strategy based on OpenStack and deliver HPC services on top of this platform

● Delivered in multiple phases

What We’re Aiming At

CLIP Cloud Architecture Hardware● Heterogeneous nodes

(high core count, high clock, large memory, GPU accelerated, NVME)

● ~ 200 compute nodes and ~ 7700 Intel SkyLake cores

● 100GbE SDN RDMA capable Ethernet and some nodes with 2x or 4x ports

● ~ 250TB NVMe IO Nodes ~ 200Gbyte/s

Analysis

Tasks Performed within “CLIP”

POC Deployment ProductionPla

nA

ctua

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Analysis POC Deployment Production

Basic understanding

Small scale

Deeper understandingDeployment, tooling, operations &

benchmarking

Production deploymentCloud & Slurm payload

Interactive ApplicationJupyerHub, Rstudio

Interactive applications on HPC systems” by Erich Birngruber at 16:00

Dez. 2017

Feb. 2018

Oct. 2018

Jan. 2019

Jan. 2019

Jul. 2019

2 months 8 months 4 months

since 6 months12 months 10 months

Deploying and Operating the Cloud

Deploying the Cloud - TripleO (OoO)● TripleO (OoO): Openstack on

OpenStack

● Undercloud: single node deployment of OpenStack.

○ Deploys the Overcloud

● Overcloud: HA deployment of OpenStack.

○ Cloud for Payload

● Installation with GUI or CLI ?

Deploying the Cloud - Should we use the GUI ?

Deploying the Cloud - Should we use the GUI ?

Deploying the Cloud - Code as Infra & GitOps !● Web GUI does not scale

○ → Disable the Web UI and deploy from the CLI

● TripleO internally uses heat to drive puppet that drives ansible ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

● Use ansible to drive the TripleO installer and rest of infra

● Entire end-2-end deployment from code

Bastion VM

Overclouddev/staging & prod

Underclouddev/staging & prod

1. Deploy undercloud

clip-stack yaml & ansible

2. Deploy overcloud

clip-uc-prepareansible

Underclouddev/staging & prodUndercloud

dev/staging & prod

Overclouddev/staging & prodOverclouddev/staging & prod

3. Configure overcloud

Deploying the Cloud - Pitfalls and Solutions!● TripleO is slow because Heat → Puppet → Ansible !!

○ Update takes ~ 60 minutes even for simple config change

● Customize using ansible instead ? Unfortunately not robust :-(

○ Stack update (scale down/up) will overwrite our changes

○ → services can be down

● → Let’s compromise: Use both

○ Iterate with ansible → Use TripleO for final configuration

● Ansible everywhere else !

○ Network, Moving nodes between environments, etc

Operating the Cloud - Package Management● 3 environments & infra as code: reproducibility and testing of upgrades

● What about software versions ? → Satellite/Foreman to the rescue !

● Software Lifecycle environments ⟷ Openstack environments

Operating the Cloud - Package Management1. Create Content Views (contains RPM repos and containers)

2. Publish new versions of Content Views

3. Test in dev/staging and roll them forward to production

Operating the Cloud - Tracking Bugs in OS● How to keep track of bugs in OpenStack ? ● → Track bugs, workaround and the status in JIRA project (CRE)

Deploying and operating the Cloud - SummaryLessons learned and pitfalls of OpenStack/Tripleo:

● OpenStack and TripleO are complex piece of software ○ Dev/staging environment & package management

● Upgrades can break the cloud in unexpected ways.○ OSP11 (non-containerized) → OSP12 (containerized)

● Containers are no free lunch○ Container build pipeline for customizations

● TripleO is a supported out of the box installer for common cloud configurations ○ Exotic configurations are challenging

● “Flying blind through clouds is dangerous”: ○ Continuous performance and regression testing

● Infra as code (end to end) way to go○ Requires discipline (proper PR reviews) and release management

Cloud Verification & Performance Testing

Cloud verification & Performance Testing● How can we make sure and

monitor that the cloud works during operations ?

● We leverage OpenStack’s own tempest testing suite to run verification against our deployed cloud.

● First smoke test (~ 128 tests) and if this is successful run full test (~ 3000 tests) against the cloud.

Cloud verification & Performance Testing● How can we make sure and

monitor that the cloud works during operations ?

● We leverage OpenStack’s own tempest testing suite to run verification against our deployed cloud.

● First smoke test (~ 128 tests) and if this is successful run full test (~ 3000 tests) against the cloud.

Cloud verification & Performance Testing● Ok, the Cloud works but what

about performance ? How can we make sure that OS performs when upgrading software packages etc ?

● We plan to use Browbeat to run Rally (control plane performance/stress testing), Shaker (network stress test) and PerfkitBenchmarker (payload performance) tests on a regular basis or before and after software upgrades or configuration changes

Cloud verification & Performance Testing● Ok, the Cloud works but what

about performance ? How can we make sure that OS performs when upgrading software packages etc ?

● We plan to use Browbeat to run Rally (control plane performance/stress testing), Shaker (network stress test) and PerfkitBenchmarker (payload performance) tests on a regular basis or before and after software upgrades or configuration changes

Cloud verification & Performance Testing● Ok, the Cloud works but what

about performance ? How can we make sure that OS performs when upgrading software packages etc ?

● We plan to use Browbeat to run Rally (control plane performance/stress testing), Shaker (network stress test) and PerfkitBenchmarker (payload performance) tests on a regular basis or before and after software upgrades or configuration changes

Cloud verification & Performance Testing● Grafana and Kibana dashboard can show

more than individual rally graphs:● Browbeat can show differences between

settings or software versions:

Scrolling through Browbeat 22 documents...

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Scenario | Action | conc.| times | 0b5ba58c | 2b177f3b | % Diff

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

create-list-router | neutron.create_router | 500 | 32 | 19.940 | 15.656 | -21.483

create-list-router | neutron.list_routers | 500 | 32 | 2.588 | 2.086 | -19.410

create-list-router | neutron.create_network| 500 | 32 | 3.294 | 2.366 | -28.177

create-list-router | neutron.create_subnet | 500 | 32 | 4.282 | 2.866 | -33.075

create-list-port | neutron.list_ports | 500 | 32 | 52.627 | 43.448 | -17.442

create-list-port | neutron.create_network| 500 | 32 | 4.025 | 2.771 | -31.165

create-list-port | neutron.create_port | 500 | 32 | 19.458 | 5.412 | -72.189

create-list-subnet | neutron.create_subnet | 500 | 32 | 11.366 | 4.809 | -57.689

create-list-subnet | neutron.create_network| 500 | 32 | 6.432 | 4.286 | -33.368

create-list-subnet | neutron.list_subnets | 500 | 32 | 10.627 | 7.522 | -29.221

create-list-network| neutron.list_networks | 500 | 32 | 15.154 | 13.073 | -13.736

create-list-network| neutron.create_network| 500 | 32 | 10.200 | 6.595 | -35.347

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

UUID | Version | Build | Number of runs

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

938dc451-d881-4f28-a6cb-ad502b177f3b | queens | 2018-03-20.2 | 1

6b50b6f7-acae-445a-ac53-78200b5ba58c | ocata | 2017-XX-XX.X | 3

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Deploying the Payload

Deploying the Cloud - SLURM Cluster

● 2 step process:

○ OpenStack Heat to provision → Ansible inventory

○ Ansible playbook/roles1 for config -> SLURM cluster

● Satellite for package management

● Dev & staging env for testing → roll over to production

● Deploy other complex systems (Spark cluster, k8s, etc)

[1] - StackHPC ansible roles: https://github.com/stackhpc

clip-hpcansible

Overclouddev/staging & prodOverclouddev/staging & prodOverclouddev/staging & prod

1. Ope

nstac

k API

1. Heat

2. AnsibleScale Up/Down& Reconfigure

Deploying the Cloud - Tunings for HPC● Tuning, Tuning, Tuning required for excellent performance

Tuning Caveats / Downside

NUMA clean instances (KVM process layout)

No live migrationsNo mixing of different VM flavors

Static huge pages (KSM etc.) setup If not enough memory is left to hypervisor → swapping or host services get OOM.No mixing of different VM flavors

Core isolation (isolcpus) Performance drop in virtual networking performance → SR-IOV

PCI-E passthrough (GPUs, NVME) and SR-IOV (NICs)

No live migrations and less features compared to fully virtualized networking

Deploying the Cloud - Pitfalls and Issues● Ansible is slow: Slurm playbook takes ~1 hour (clean 2nd run !)

○ Use tags for recurring day 2 operations (i.e new mount points, change of QOS, etc)

● Satellite 👍 for software versions but remove upstream Centos repos after install

● Some issues only hit under scale:○ SDN scaling issues when provisioning more than 70 nodes. Workaround: scale in batches

● Isolation of environments ends with shared infra components especially when tightly integrating with OpenStack

○ Update of DEV environment caused datacenter wide network outage (bug in SDN)

● Beware of unintended consequences of code changes○ Triggered accidental re-deploy of payload because of single line change in heat template

HPC on OpenStack - Lessons Learned

● OpenStack is incredibly complex

● OpenStack is not a product. It is a framework.

● You need 2-3 OpenStack environments (development, staging, prod in our case) to practice and understand upgrades and updates.

● Scaling above certain amount of nodes will be an issue

● Cloud networking is really hard (especially in our case)

● Open source software with commercial support

● OpenStack integrates well with existing datacenter infrastructure

● API driven software defined datacenter

● Easily deploy multiple payloads side by side like in a Cloud 😏

● Covers a wide range of use cases ranging from virtualized & baremetal HPC clusters to container orchestration engines

Bad & Ugly Good

Thanks

Acknowledgements

HPC Team

Erich BirngruberPetar ForaiPetar JagerÜmit Seren